from Hacker News

Ask HN: Is Perl making a comeback?

by shadowcats on 12/23/13, 4:14 PM with 18 comments

For years, there were pretty much zero articles about Perl posted here. Even Java received more linkage.

Recently, I'm seeing a small trickle of Perl posts, which makes me wonder if this is the beginning of a new trend.

Is Perl making a comeback?

  • by danhoc01 on 12/23/13, 5:34 PM

    I was a Perl hacker for almost three years. It was my first dynamic, interpreted language and is what made me fall in love with writing software. Writing Perl was when I first felt that I was hacking rather than programming.

    The largest problem is that it's largely unreadable, a write-only language. There's too much magic in Perl. Perl 6 is making strides to correct this, but the culture of Perl is what makes me believe that it will never be a viable choice over other dynamic, interpreted languages. I moved to Python and will never look back. The Perl culture is exactly what lured me in to programming, so I'd rather it not change anyways.

    There are definitely still companies using Perl in production, but my guess is that it's always for legacy reasons.

  • by runjake on 12/23/13, 4:45 PM

    For many of us, Perl never went away. Been using it since the early 90s. It's ugly, but I know it, it does the job well, and it's reliable.

  • by melling on 12/23/13, 8:33 PM

    No, people just started jamming in Perl headlines in the past few days. Anyone can submit, after all. It's the 3rd most popular dynamic language. One of Perl's claim's to fame was CPAN, but at this point there's probably more than enough Python or Ruby library support. Ruby and Python also have also JVM support. You'll still find Perl in a lot of legacy software because it was king for a decade. These days, I would probably just go with Python or Ruby on any new project because it's easier to find developers.

    Finally, consider if you want to outsource on oDesk, for example. There's a better chance of getting readable Python than readable Perl.

  • by bliti on 12/23/13, 9:40 PM

    It never left. You won't read about it here because its not in. Remember that this community revolves around a younger generation of programmers that learned to build web cruds with rails. Not a bad thing. They just see Perl as old.

  • by lsiebert on 12/26/13, 11:28 AM

    Hacker News represents a VERY small segment of the computer programming population. That's fine, but don't be confused if the echo chamber occasionally produces weird results. Perl is still in use in major companies, for web stuff and system administration, but also game development, hardware simulation testing and other cool things. It's not sexy, and it seems arcane to programmers used to more modern languages. But there are things happening in it.

  • by arjn on 12/23/13, 5:04 PM

    perl is in active use among sysadmin and devops people.

  • by abvdasker on 12/23/13, 5:07 PM

  • by patal on 12/23/13, 4:27 PM

    please not